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Why is my XBOX TV named Maui?

Even if I did not work for Microsoft, I would still own one, it beats any system on the planet. Although I still feel a bit nostalgic for my old Atari and my TI 94a with voice synthesizer (nothing better than Parsec with the computer voice, totally awesome!) For all of my video games I have always had the second hand tv or the hand me down, and at one time I was playing Atari Combat on a black and white tv.

So when I got a job and I could control such things as the quality of TV for my video games. I took my $20 I got for my birthday and headed to Compusa to buy the nicest TV I could find, and I stumbled onto an awesome looking device by HP. I found the HPf2304 and it provided two great benefits for me ( a lot more back when I bought it). One it allowed me to consolidate my computer monitor and Xbox TV. It even allowed me to do PIP with XBOX on the main screen, while I could watch my backup run on my computer and get wiped out playing Halo2. However, the single most coolest thing was that monitor supported up to 1080i High definition. I had reached the pinnacle, video games in amazing resolution, even playing games at a meager 480p is just amazing and my buddy Keith Combs has some interesting information on HDTV with a bunch more information coming!

So anyway here I am playing XBOX and mostly loving it, but I discovered when playing xbox in HDTV with the F2304 my brand new, rocking monitor was extremely dim. I pumped up the brightness and this seemed to help a little, until my wife kept using the computer and pumping down the brightness to do work. Later I found this to be a known issue and no fix in site I was depressed. In the mean time BrightnessGate caused a minor arguement, which during the discussion my wife said and I quote: “Stop turning the brightness up on Maui!!!” totally confused at the reference to a wonderful vacation spot and a computer device, I naturally responded with a typical comment of mine: “Huh”. Bottom line when I waded through this conversation it boiled down to, we could have gone to Maui instead of buying my XBOX TV. Now I understood the pain point of my lovely wife. So disappointed with my TV and lack of tan, I took my f2304 back to the store, and spend some time in Maui getting a tan.

However low and behold, much to my satisfaction…err I mean my immense disappointment. :-) it was beyond the return period to get cash back in my hand but I got store credit. BTW Compusa will not book a trip for you, I tried. :-) So I was on a mission, XBOX in hand with proper cables I went through the store trying all the TV’s in the store to verify I got proper HDTV. The Compusa store people were stellar at letting me do this, and they had never seen Halo2 in HDTV so I was in demo heaven! So at the end of the day I settled on a wonderful Sony WEGA TV (Still affectionately referred to as Maui).

Excited as a my kids during Christmas morning, I took my new productivity tool home and hooked it all up. Playing in HDTV can be quite time consuming and very fulfilling even if your wife is sighing under her breath: Maui, Maui, Maui. I pretended to ignore her. :-)